


The Trials and Tribulations of Master Kenobi, Gentleman

by treescape



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Prequel Trilogy
Genre: Alternate Universe - Regency, Eventual M Rating in Chapter 4, Falling In Love, Fluff, M/M, Minor Padmé Amidala/Anakin Skywalker, Poetry
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-08-09
Updated: 2020-08-09
Packaged: 2021-03-06 00:28:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,917
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25804390
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/treescape/pseuds/treescape
Summary: If therewasa truth universally acknowledged, Obi-Wan rather thought it was that trouble would always,alwaysfind him.Or, a QuiObi Regency AU.
Relationships: CC-2224 | Cody & Obi-Wan Kenobi, Obi-Wan Kenobi & Ahsoka Tano, Padmé Amidala & Obi-Wan Kenobi, Qui-Gon Jinn & Anakin Skywalker, Qui-Gon Jinn/Obi-Wan Kenobi
Comments: 19
Kudos: 42





	The Trials and Tribulations of Master Kenobi, Gentleman

**Author's Note:**

> This is a late prompt fill for this spectacular prompt of [Chibiobiwan](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Chibiobiwan/pseuds/Chibiobiwan)’s in the MaytheFourth Prompt Fest on the Qui-Gon/Obi-Wan Discord server: “Regency AU! Obi-Wan is the youngest son of a country gentleman. He is sent to school in London and joins a ‘Gentleman’s Club’ for men of the ‘same’ taste. There he briefly meets Qui-Gon, but soon he has to return home where he finds out his sisters are hopelessly interested in the new neighbour and his even wealthier friend. Cue Austenian like escapades.”
> 
> This is basically set in Regency England, just with a few obvious changes and inconsistencies (a Regency scholar I am not) and Star Wars place names. Not going to lie, this fic is largely an excuse for me to have Qui-Gon and Obi-Wan read poetry to each other while they fall in love.
> 
> A thousand thanks to [outpastthemoat](https://archiveofourown.org/users/outpastthemoat/pseuds/outpastthemoat) and [tessiete](https://archiveofourown.org/users/tessiete/pseuds/tessiete) for reading this for me.

_More flowers I noted, yet I none could see  
But sweet or colour it had stol’n from thee._  
\--Shakespeare, Sonnet 99

The philosophers were, for the most part, in agreement: there were no truths universally acknowledged as such. Of course, there were always a few outliers who argued for the validity of their own vested opinions, so even _that_ was sometimes in dispute. But these days, in academic circles, subjective experience was the name of the game.

Naturally, certain high-ranking members of the aristocracy had heard only the words “universal truths,” thrown the rest out of the window, and run full tilt. It had become something of a parlour game to lounge about in drawing rooms, duelling with truths rather than with swords. And as the aristocracy went, so most of the landed gentry indubitably followed, much to Obi-Wan’s chagrin.

Obi-Wan’s mother was the worst offender he knew. Her favourite truth to maintain was that a single person in possession of a good fortune was always in want of a spouse. Of course, since the Kenobi fortune wasn’t as grand as she might have wished and she had two sons as well as two daughters to marry off, she liked to maintain that a single person in possession of good humour and a _mediocre_ fortune was _also_ in want of a spouse.

But that was a somewhat different story, better suited to a different person, because Obi-Wan had no interest in spouses.

If there _was_ a truth universally acknowledged, he rather thought it was that trouble would always, _always_ find him.

And most people, indeed, would agree.

\---

Obi-Wan did not fall in love at first sight. It wasn’t that he didn’t _believe_ in love at first sight; he was sure it had happened somewhere, to someone, at some point in the long course of history. But that night, he was fairly certain, it did not happen to him.

He was, however, absolutely captivated.

But we’re getting a little ahead of ourselves. Let us begin with the rain.

\---

Coruscant was dreary in the rain; it wasn’t like Stewjon, which came alive in a riot of colour. At home, Obi-Wan could stand for long minutes with his face turned to the sky. In the city, the rain drove people inside with a chill that lasted for hours.

Obi-Wan made it to Dexter’s just in time. He hovered there on the threshold for a few seconds, just under the overhang at the entrance, and watched as the first drops grew rapidly into a drizzle. He knew it would be a downpour soon enough.

Stepping fully into the entry hall of his gentleman’s club, Obi-Wan tugged on the chain of his pocket watch until he could just see the time. He was early for dinner with Cody, as he’d hoped to be; it was impossible to judge traffic at this hour of the day, for all that his best friend insisted there was an art to it.

Brushing a few drops of water from the grey wool of his jacket, Obi-Wan moved briskly across the geometrically tiled foyer and up one curving staircase to the gallery above. A faint hint of smoke from crisp Endorian cigars wafted through the air as he passed the gaming room on the right, but he could see only one game of sabacc underway through the open doors. Dexter’s was quieter than Obi-Wan had seen it in weeks; the season was winding down, signalling the great migration of gentlemen to their country estates for the summer.

Obi-Wan himself would be leaving for Stewjon in just a few days. One last brief summer at home, one more year of study at Temple’s Court and learning from Master Windu, and Obi-Wan could expect to be called to the bar.

The library was empty when he reached it, though he couldn’t say that it was ever truly silent. The sound of carriages rolling through the streets below carried up to his ears, and the sound of hooves on wet cobblestones devised an echoing backdrop. Obi-Wan tended not to mind the noise; his father’s library at home was almost never silent, not with Ahsoka chattering in the background, or Padme and Garen debating Plato or Aristotle or Donne, or pages turning like clockwork as the Kenobi siblings studied.

The shelves reached high above his head, filling the air with the familiar scent of paper and leather and ink. Swiftly crossing the room, Obi-Wan smiled as his eyes fell on a well-familiar name, and he pulled the small volume off the shelf. Keats was one of Padme’s favourite poets, though Obi-Wan found him too melancholy much of the time. Over the past several years, Obi-Wan had gotten into a number of spirited debates with the elder of his two sisters as to the various values and demerits of the modern poets. Obi-Wan himself preferred the wit and the vivacity of the earlier poets—of Cavendish and Shakespeare and Jonson and their ilk.

Still, there was no denying the beauty in Keats’s lines, and here was his newest book, one which Obi-Wan and Padme had not yet had the chance to dissect.

Obi-Wan rifled through the pages until a title caught his eye. He had heard of this one, an epic recounting of the Titans and the Olympians, abandoned and unfinished by the poet but still published here in his latest volume. As Obi-Wan’s eyes moved across the lines, he found himself beginning to read out loud, falling into the measured cadence of the words.

“As when, upon a tranced summer-night,  
Those green-rob’d senators of mighty woods,  
Tall oaks, branch-charmed by the earnest stars,  
Dream, and so dream all night without a stir,  
Save from one gradual solitary gust  
Which comes upon the silence, and dies off…”

For a moment, Obi-Wan fell silent, carried away despite himself to the greenery of woods, and the smell of oaks, and the heavy sweetness of a summer night’s breeze. He shook his head, dispelling the bewitchment of the words, and made to continue with the poem. But just as his eyes found his place again, an unfamiliar voice spoke suddenly from outside his line of vision, somewhere over his shoulder near the entrance to the library.

“Not one of his most well-known,” the voice said, and it curled its way up Obi-Wan’s spine in a way that felt almost decadent. It was the type of voice, he thought fancifully, still caught in the grips of poetry, that had sunk bone-deep before one even realized it.

It was a voice Obi-Wan thought he could listen to for hours.

“Perhaps I aim to be unfashionable,” he said wryly, in part just so he could hear the man speak again, and turned to face him.

Obi-Wan generally prided himself on being surprised by very little, but it felt, very suddenly, as if the world had shifted on its axis. Until that very moment, if anyone had asked if there was a man who could match that voice, he would have laughed and bet everything his family owned that it was beyond all realms of possibility.

And Obi-Wan was not, as it were, a gambling man.

Probably, he thought almost giddily, that was for the best; his father would certainly have had some more-than-choice words for him had Obi-Wan made them paupers.

From a few feet away, the man towered over Obi-Wan. His arms and shoulders fairly strained the cleanly tailored lines of his jacket, a shade of dark green that was nearly black and suited him so entirely that Obi-Wan would never again feel anything but drab in his own dark charcoal grey. The way his shoulders and chest tapered down to his neat waist only served to make him seem even larger than he already was. His legs, encased in beige trousers…

Truly, it was best not to look at this man’s legs, or even to _think_ about them.

But somehow, the man’s face was even more arresting than his figure. Deep set eyes of blue, the most expressive Obi-Wan had ever seen, surveyed him from a strong face with a neatly trimmed beard. His nose, crooked slightly as if it had been broken at some point in the past, somehow fit that face perfectly. His long hair, a deep mahogany gone slightly grey at the temples, was pulled tightly back in a queue.

This man was, without a doubt, the most singularly compelling man Obi-Wan had ever seen.

“Ah, but fashionableness does not speak to quality,” that voice said, and Obi-Wan had to actively pull his attention away from the man’s face so as not to miss what he was saying. The way his mouth looked as it shaped the syllables of his words was branded into Obi-Wan’s mind. “I would say you have good taste.” The man nodded his head towards the book in Obi-Wan’s hand. “It is my favourite in the volume.”

That was interesting enough that Obi-Wan didn’t even stumble in his response. “There is something melancholy about an epic unfinished,” he said, tilting his head in curiosity as his eyes took in the other man’s apparent good humour.

A smile, and eyes that creased at the corners as his lips turned upwards in a smile. “Some would say that in melancholy there is always the search for hope.”

“It should be nice to think that one can find the latter without the former,” Obi-Wan returned easily, finding himself very suddenly and very fully absorbed by the beginnings of a good debate.

The man opened his mouth to reply, and Obi-Wan felt a slight thrill of anticipation to hear what he would say—but before he could get a word out, another figure appeared in the doorway of the library.

“Jinn, we’re going to be late,” the newcomer said with an impatient toss of his golden curls.

The man’s head— _Jinn_ ’s head—turned for a moment. When he turned back, Obi-Wan did not think it was his imagination that it was with a regretful look. “And I the ‘ebbing air’,” he said, and then with a polite inclination of his head, he was gone.

Almost unbidden, Obi-Wan’s eyes fell back to the open book still in his hands, the sound of the man’s voice still echoing in his ears as he read silently:

“Which comes upon the silence, and dies off,  
As if the ebbing air had but one wave;  
So came these words and went…”

As he looked back up at the empty doorway of the library, all Obi-Wan could think of was what the man had been about to say. Somehow, he knew it would plague him for days.

A hand suddenly clapped onto his shoulder, breaking off his thoughts, and Obi-Wan came back to the present to see Cody standing beside him.

“There you are,” he said absently, turning to greet his friend and trying to look as if he wasn’t still gazing, out of the corner of his eyes, in the direction the man had disappeared. “It’s about time.”

Cody, of course, was as precisely on time as he always was, but he ignored Obi-Wan’s faint joke in favour of other things. “I was waiting outside. You sounded occupied,” he said, in that grave voice that Obi-Wan knew meant Cody was teasing him just a little. “I thought it best not to intervene.”

Obi-Wan shook his head morosely. “My friend, he said slowly, “it might have been better if you had. I didn’t even manage a proper introduction.”

**Author's Note:**

> The poem Obi-Wan reads from is John Keats’s Hyperion, an unfinished epic which was nonetheless published in his 1820 _Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St. Agnes, and Other Poems_.
> 
> The next chapter will see us move to the countryside, where--surprise, surprise--Naboo has been let at last.
> 
> Thank you so much for reading!


End file.
